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Left: Donald Trump and Elon Musk appear on Fox News on Feb. 18, 2025 (Fox News/YouTube). Right: Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn. (U.S. House of Representatives). Inset: U.S. District Judge John Bates speaks at the National Constitution Center on Dec. 13, 2018 (YouTube).
For the third time in two weeks, a federal judge has had articles of impeachment filed against him in the U.S. House of Representatives over temporary pauses imposed on Trump administration policies.
On Feb. 11, Washington, D.C.-based U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a temporary restraining order directing four administrative agencies to restore a series of webpages and datasets that had been removed from public health websites.
As has become standard with such injunctive relief being granted to plaintiffs suing the government, Republicans on the internet expressed outrage and called for the judge to face consequences.
In Bates’ case, President Trump’s head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, joined a pile-on started by Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) said: “We should at least ATTEMPT to fire this junky jurist.”
Now, attempts are being made.
On Monday, Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, filed House Resolution 157, which accuses the judge of “high crimes and misdemeanors” over the temporary restraining order. The bill was subsequently referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
“John Deacon Bates, a judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, engaged in a pattern of conduct that is incompatible with the trust and confidence placed in him,” the lone article of impeachment in the resolution begins.
The resolution takes stock of some language in the court’s ruling, highlighting sections where Bates opined that “each agency failed to examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action” and where Bates noted “the substantial reliance by medical professionals on the removed webpages.”
In the court’s order, the judge mainly cabined his analysis to how the lack of information has forced two particular doctors to spend less time treating patients in real-world settings — due to increased research time locating similar resources or lack of resources entirely.
The Ogles resolution elides those judicial findings in favor of a lengthy lecture against transgender health care access for minors.
From the article of impeachment, at length:
Judge Bates failed to consider that these webpages maintained informational resources on gender affirming care — better described as the intentional surgical or chemical castration of children — and that at no time in the history of the American judicial system, until very recently, would judges have considered the purposeful damage to the bodies of healthy young men and women to be a compelling or even legitimate health concern. To the contrary, it is the opinion of this Congress that the continued socialization of this grave moral evil necessitates immediate action against those who would promote it.
The resolution also singles out the plaintiffs in the underlying litigation, Doctors for America, a progressive physicians and medical students advocacy organization, as a “far-left organization.”
“Accordingly, Judge John Deacon Bates, has engaged in conduct so utterly lacking in intellectual honesty and basic integrity that he is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, is unfit to hold the office of Federal judge, and should be removed from office,” the resolution concludes.
Ogles also went so far as to criticize Bates directly in a post on X announcing the impeachment resolution.
“I just formally introduced articles of impeachment against RADICAL LGBTQ ACTIVIST U.S. District Judge John Bates,” the congressman wrote. “His attempt to block President Trump’s order to remove webpages containing resources for ‘gender-affirming care’ from government sites is appalling.”
The social media post goes on to accuse the judge of supporting “the surgical or chemical castration of healthy children.” This language, however, does not appear in the court’s order.
Last week, Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Republican from Wisconsin, was the first of two GOP congressmen to file articles of impeachment against Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer. In that resolution, the judge was called to account for a temporary restraining order barring DOGE staffers from accessing sensitive Treasury Department data.
Days later, Rep. Eli Crane, an Arizona Republican, filed a separate resolution seeking Engelmayer’s impeachment.
Neither the Van Orden nor the Ogles bills have any congressional cosponsors as of this writing. The Crane resolution currently has five cosponsors — one of whom is Ogles himself.
In the quickly-blooming, cross-pollinating, judicial impeachment ecosphere that exists online, Crane promoted the Ogles resolution in an X post praising the “momentum building to hold these activist judges accountable.”
Musk also commented favorably on the latest impeachment development, writing: “”Time to impeach judges who violate the law.”
